Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

From Lonely Only to Authentically Me in the Academy and Beyond

Cristina Santamaría Graff

Indiana University Indianapolis

Keywords: Identity, Liminility, Intersectionality, Women of Color, Loneliness, Authenticity

Abstract

This letter examines the movement from “Lonely Only” to “Authentically Me” within the lived experience of a bicultural Mexican American mother-scholar and faculty member who describes navigating educational spaces from childhood through higher education. Drawing from formative moments of racialized exclusion, linguistic policing, and cultural dissonance in White-dominant Catholic schools and other educational spaces, the author traces how identity fragmentation emerged through pressures of assimilation and compliance. Writing across first- and third-person narration, she conceptualizes Lonely Only as both an internalized response to isolation and an archetype shaped by procedural, hierarchical, and covert systems that marginalize women of Color.

Through experiences teaching in an Indigenous Yucatec Mayan community and reflecting on her liminal racial positioning as a bicultural Mexicana—phenotypically White (Irish/Italian heritages) and Mexican—the author argues that belonging is contextual and multidimensional. Her personal journey reveals how broader geo-political and societal constructs – rooted in Westernized dominance and Christian ideologies – shape who is perceived as legitimate within educational spaces.

The letter reframes Lonely Only not through a deficit lens, but as adaptive within environments that fragment and silence. By consciously naming and integrating this archetype, the author articulates Authentically Me as an individual self-grounded in accountability and discernment while being critically aware of inequitable systems. In a current political moment marked by the erosion of protections affecting women of Color, this letter calls higher education to recognize the structural conditions that produce isolation and to support women of Color in reclaiming their full, authentic selves within the academy.